Labor board confirms graduate student union election


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The fate of a prospective union of USC graduate student workers will hinge on a Feb. 15 to 16 election, the National Labor Relations Board confirmed in a notice Wednesday. A simple majority vote of union-eligible workers will decide the outcome.

Negotiations last month between USC and the coalition — formally named the Graduate Student Worker Organizing Committee — defined union-eligible workers as all teaching assistants, assistant lecturers, research assistants, students funded through training grants and fellows in STEM disciplines.

“We are united in a belief that by banding together we can have greater support and better lives,” the GSWOC wrote in a Monday press release. “With a union, we can address problems like earning less than a living wage, insufficient healthcare benefits, discrimination, bullying and harassment, and a lack of legal and structural support for international workers.”

The University declined the Daily Trojan’s request for comment on the coming election. 

In an early January faculty memo, Kelvin Davies, interim vice provost for academic and faculty affairs, wrote that the University does “not believe that unionization is in the best interests of our graduate students.” 

Voting on University Park Campus will commence in shifts starting at 8 a.m. on Feb. 15 in the west building lobby of Wallis Annenberg Hall. The election at the Health Sciences Campus and Buck Institute will occur simultaneously in the Clinical Services Center and Drexler Auditorium, respectively. All voters must wear face coverings under the agreed-upon election policy.

This month’s vote has been a long time coming: The GSWOC began mustering followers in the summer of 2020 and, in 2021, conducted climate surveys and began floating unionization. 
The group started distributing union authorization cards in April 2022, which roughly 60% of eligible workers signed by December of that year, triggering a two-day hearing with the NLRB last month.